The photo attached is an empty road. Unfortunately this is a place that some people have to call home. There are thousands of South Africans who are homeless and who live on the streets. These people may enter hospitals and they get treated by the appropriate health care professionals. However, walking into a ward full of patients you do not know the personal stories behind each patient. As a health professional you have interaction with these patients and in most of the cases you get to know more about the patient through the subjective assessment and interactions during treatment. I treated a patient who was very open to me about her life and shared many personal stories about being homeless, how she lives and how she got into the situation she was in. Listening to this patient’s stories I couldn’t help but empathise with her and try to begin to imagine how she must feel by being homeless, cold, lonely and scared while living on the street.
While treating this patient I found myself empathising with her more than any of the other patient’s due to her circumstances, the stories she told me and what she will have to go back to after being discharged from the hospital. The patient always complained about having cold feet and she had no socks because someone had stolen them and she could not afford new socks. For me having socks to keep your feet warm is a basic necessity. Meeting someone who’s only “want” is a pair of socks had a profound effect on me. Something I take for granted every day is someone’s biggest “want”. Again I found myself empathising with this patient who had no family, was homeless and longed for a basic need. I bought this patient a pair of socks during the time I was treating her.
Reflecting back on this action, I questioned whether I crossed the patient physio professional line by getting to know the patient’s personal background, empathising with the patient’s stories and resulting in buying her a gift in the form of a pair of socks. The motive behind the socks was a human instinct of wanting to help someone who is in need. When looking at a physio patient relationship, ethically I am reflecting whether it was correct to empathise with the patient to the point of wanting to help them outside the scope of physiotherapy. By doing small things for patients such as explained above, this means not every patient is getting the same level of treatment. Treatment has now gone beyond physiotherapy scope and depending on the patient, their openness with you about their personal information and your level of empathy, the treatment is no longer of equal standard for everyone.
It is proven that showing empathy towards patients improves the patient’s experience and interaction with the health professional. However empathy should be an intellectual rather than an emotional form of knowing (Halpern, 2003). Therefore making a distinction between understanding the patient’s situation and feelings to treat the patient holistically versus getting emotionally too involved in the patient’s hardships by wanting to help beyond your scope of physiotherapy treatment. Despite the patient’s background every patient deserves the same level of treatment and care. Ethically this can be challenging as some patients may be more compliant or their case more intriguing to you. Despite this every patient has their own social story and as a health professional you will come across many different stories which may touch your heart. Empathy in treatment is important but appropriate management within physiotherapy should be maintained to ensure each patient is treated equally regardless of their social backgrounds.
References
Halpern, J. (2003). What is Clinical Empathy?. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1494899/
3 thoughts on “Where to from here? (Tanner)”
Thank you for sharing your piece! I thought it was brilliant the way you linked the image above to the patient’s social background. The fact that the image provided does not immediately introduce what the piece may potentially focus on captured my attention and left me wanting to read further so that I was able to determine the link between the image and your piece. I loved how you utilized this simple image of an empty road and linked it to a particular clinical encounter. Furthermore, I love the fact that you share your honest feelings in the piece, that is, empathizing with this particular patient more than you do with other patients due to her circumstances which i think many of us tend to do in a clinical setting. I love how you also questioned whether you crossed a professional boundary by providing her with socks and how you came to the realization the way in which your knowledge of someone’s circumstances may influence you to transcend certain boundaries. You could therefore go more into depth with regards to becoming too emotionally involved when treating a patient with a social background such as the patient you have encountered and perhaps refer to literature that may potentially provide ways in which you can potentially maintain professional distance. I love the fact that you end off by exploring literature based on the concept of empathy to support your experience within the clinical setting.
I thoroughly enjoyed your piece of work. You did a great job of linking up the picture of the empty road to your clinical experience. Although I was a little confused as to where it was going, in the beginning but it made me want to read on. Your piece is relatable, because as humans we are prone to want to help others who are in need. Maybe you can find literature, on this, pertaining to why we as humans do that. I like how you gave a detailed description of your experience with this patient, as it also made me feel, what you felt for the patient. I liked that you showed your understanding of the concept of empathy in ethics, as you were able to link it up with you your experience. What you can do, to make you piece even stronger, is use to more references regarding the concept of empathy in clinical practice. I would also like to know if you end up, in a similar situation, in the future, how would you handle the situation? Would you do the same thing or handle it differently? You can refer to the literature, as to how to handle the situation differently next time. How will you ensure to treat all your patients equally, regardless of who they are or their social background. But overall great piece of work.
Firstly, I just want to say that I think you wrote a very good piece of work. From the moment I saw your picture and your title, I was intrigued on what this writing is about. I didn’t immediately know where this is going but it kept my interest throughout. The picture tells a thousand words, and I think it was very well chosen with regards to your writing.
I think many of us struggle a lot on where we draw the line between patient and physiotherapy professional line, and I think you gave a good example of this. Whether you were correct or not does not matter to me as you explained the reasons for your actions very well. You showed a lot of empathy, and I think that is something many of us don’t always do in situations like that.
I find very little wrong with what you wrote. Maybe you could just add a bit more with regards to literature. You could possibly see what does the literature say about the patient and physiotherapy professional line and compare to what you did. This might help you in the future if you were in a similar situation. You can maybe also add that to your writing to say how you will respond if you were in a similar situation in the future.
I think most students can relate to this piece very well. And I liked the way you explained at the end that you still recognised the fact that every patient deserves the same treatment, even though everyone’s circumstances is not always the same.
Just to end off, I think you did a really good job and you can be happy with it.